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In
Search of a Community...and Frybread It
was a gray, rainy day last fall. I had just gotten out of class and was
walking across the University of Montana campus. It was cold, but I didn't
notice. Instead, I was thinking about my stomach. I hadn't eaten for a
while, and I was hungry. I
thought, "Damn, a piece of frybread would be excellent right now."
Frybread, essentially rolled and flattened pieces of dough fried in oil,
has its origins long ago, when the wasitchus (whites) first told us: "You
gotta stay in this one spot. You can't hunt any more." "How
are we supposed to feed our families?" we said. "Don't worry,"
they said. "You won't have to. We'll feed you. We'll give you rations."
So a lot of Indians gave up a lot of land for those rations. In return,
we received rancid bacon and wormy flour. And with this we made frybread.
It has since evolved into popular food in Indian Country. I hadn't seen
any frybread since I left the reservation. "As a matter of fact,"
I thought, "I haven't seen any Indians, either. Where were all the
other Indian students?" I wondered. I glanced around at the other
students who were walking to and from class. As usual, I was the only
brown-skinned kid in sight. Then I realized that for the first time in
my life, I was the only Indian I knew. Suddenly, I felt very much alone. I
kept walking. As I did, my thoughts drifted back to my youth, to my home
in the housing projects, where my mother was in the kitchen, cooking frybread
and singing in Lakota. There's nothing like homemade frybread: the crisp,
golden outside, the warm chewy inside ... I
could almost taste it. "That's why there are no Indian students,"
I concluded. "It's impossible to get any frybread around here." All
of a sudden I wanted more than anything to leave this land of strangers
and go back home. To hell with school and getting an education and all
that. High-flying ideals don't mean much when you're really hungry. All
I wanted was something to eat, preferably a nice warm piece of frybread.
I
arrived at my car, which also served as my place of residence, and got
in the passenger side where there was more room. I sat there by myself,
staring at my windshield. It was starting to get dark outside. A couple
of blonde girls walked by. They looked at me with scared, somewhat disgusted
expressions and quickly walked away. I
couldn't blame them. My car is very small and I am very tall, so every
morning when I wake up and look in the rearview mirror, the person looking
back looks a little worse than the day before. "I'm
not going to make it," I thought. "Nobody told me that I'd have
to starve to go to college. I never went hungry on the rez, especially
for frybread. I should go home. Nobody cares about me here anyway. I should
just go home." I
sat in silence. By now it was dark outside. I found a half-smoked cigarette
in the ashtray and lit it. "Why aren't there more Indians?"
I thought to myself. Well, to begin with, nobody expects Indians to make
it to college in the first place. I certainly never saw any recruiters
in the projects. The posters in the classrooms said "Education is
the key to your future" or "You need to get educated,"
but they never said how or where or with what. I
looked at my friends who managed to graduate high school, and if they
were really lucky, they had a job hanging drywall or bagging groceries.
If they weren't lucky, they were dead. I
saw this and thought, "I better get an education." So I packed
up and hit the road, college bound. Once I got there, most of the kids
and even some of the teachers I talked to would say to me: "You're
so lucky. Your tribe pays for your education. You get a free ride."
This, of course, is completely untrue. My tribe is probably more broke
than I am. Simply being an Indian nowadays is hard. The farther away from
your reservation you get, the harder and more complicated life gets. You've
got the odds stacked against you from the start of your higher-learning
career. Less
than 50 percent of all Indian students graduate high school, according
to George Russell's "Contemporary Demographics of the American Indian."
Of those, only 17 percent attend college and only 4 percent ever graduate.
Most Indians who go away to school leave behind the closeness of their
homes and families and people they've known all their lives. While this
is true for most youths who go away to college, Indian families on the
rez are very close-knit. Unfortunately,
those who do leave may soon discover that the outside world can be a very
cold and hostile place and the people equally so. Off the rez, many have
their first real encounters with bigotry and prejudice. I know I did.
I never met anyone who hated Indians until after I left the rez. Then
I had my first run-in with the white supremacist militia after getting
lost in the woods. I found myself staring down the barrel of a skinhead's
shotgun while he looked at me with what can only be described as pure
hatred. I think he was planning to kill me, but his buddy talked him out
of it. I also never heard of Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., who has been
called the next Custer, or the anti-Indian movement until I went to college.
After I left the reservation, it was as if I was behind enemy lines or
in a foreign country. A country where they didn't care about pow-wows
or sundances
or sweatlodges and the values like tradition, community and oneness with
the Earth that they represent. I know that if they did, things would be
a lot better for everyone. And maybe I could get some frybread.
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